WINDSOR — David Byrne’s house shows little sign of the tornado that thundered through town a year ago today, clawing away his roof and blasting out windows.

But the jumble of neatly sawed tree trunks piled at the edge of his property are a reminder of the storm’s ferocity.

“I was looking out the window and saw large sections of fence and large trees flying by,” Byrne, a 58-year-old carpenter, said Wednesday. “They weren’t tumbling on the street, they were flying.”

Byrne’s home at the corner of First Avenue and Locust Street is one of more than 1,600 Windsor houses damaged — 418 of them severely — in the tornado last May 22, said Dawn Jaeger, assistant town manager.

The twister scoured a mile-wide corridor through the town and beyond, killing one man near Greeley and trashing homes and vehicles. Winds as high as 165 mph uprooted trees, tumbled rail cars and semis, killed cattle, ruptured gas lines and pounded the town with baseball-size hail.

Down the block from Byrne’s home, the winds tore the steeple from the Windsor Church of Christ. Today, the church sports a new steeple.

“This whole town has had a face-lift,” Byrne said. “Everybody got a new roof.”

But scars remain.

Dale Spencer, 56, has only to step out of his home at 112 Elm St. to see reminders of the day he abandoned the sausage, biscuit and gravy he was cooking and ran into his basement with his dogs.

Plywood still covers the windows of the home next to his. At a house across the street, tar paper is stretched over a roof where shingles soon will be nailed in place.

Spencer, who heard his windows exploding into splinters as he huddled in his basement, was left with a smashed chimney, dirt-covered interior walls and debris-strewn floors. “We were boarded up for three months,” said Spencer, who has done most repairs himself. “It got to be like living in a cave.”

Insurance claims on property and vehicles filed in the days after the storm are estimated at 24,000 for an insured total of $193.5 million, making it Colorado’s most expensive tornado, according to the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association.

The tornado that wrecked Limon on June 6, 1990, cost insurers $20 million, or about $30.8 million in 2008 dollars.

The U.S. Small Business Administration approved more than $3 million in disaster loans to individuals and businesses in Windsor and elsewhere in Weld County.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency provided $170,022 in housing assistance and $246,813 to residents to repair or replace uninsured personal property and other expenses. The agency also gave a $542,070 grant to provide crisis counselors.

Doug Morey, 45, owner of Morey’s Glass & Metals, was taking an order from a woman whose windows had just disintegrated when he noticed a storm of debris speeding past his window. The sky was a curtain of black and white, he said.

He crouched next to a file cabinet and covered his head with his jacket. “I’d look up and watch the building flex.”

As he heard the steel trusses twisting, the roof came loose. The ceiling collapsed onto a car and truck parked inside the building.

When Morey’s St. Bernard, Dakota, appeared at the shop, he realized that his house had been hit four blocks away. He grabbed the dog and ran into the basement of a nearby home.

When he surfaced, he found that the roof from his business had sliced into a home across the street. A tree had smashed through a wall in his glass shop, and a piece of steel from the garage door was jutting from a tree.

There was $145,000 in damage to the shop, $40,000 to his home and $16,000 to a rental house he and his wife, Tracy, own. Insurance covered almost all the bills, Morey said. Today there is little evidence of the storm at any of his properties.

One reminder is framed on an interior wall of the couple’s home: wind chimes embedded in the stucco.

In the wake of the tempest, other residents emerged from shelter and surveyed the damage with dazed eyes, said David Tallman, owner of Windsor Collision Center on First Street.

But it wasn’t long before the National Guard was on the scene, front-end loaders and trucks were rumbling through the streets, and people set to work cleaning up the mess.

“Everybody responded quickly,” he said. “It was kind of cool to see everybody coming together.”

The Windsor tornado wrecked Chimney and Cemetery parks, disrupting a season of youth baseball last year. Play resumes at 5:30 this afternoon when simultaneous pitches will be thrown from the mounds at all three renovated fields at Chimney Park, 200 E. Chestnut St.

Other anniversary events are scheduled for tonight at Chimney Park, including:

A general assignment reporter for The Denver Post, Tom McGhee has covered business, police, courts, higher education and breaking news. He came to The Post from Albuquerque, N.M., where he worked for a year and a half covering utilities. He began his journalism career in New York City, worked for a pair of community weeklies that covered the west side of Manhattan from 14th Street to 125th Street.

Spain came under repeated attack starting Thursday in what authorities called linked terrorist incidents, when a driver swerved a van into crowds in Barcelona’s historic Las Ramblas district, killing more than a dozen people and injuring scores of others. Early Friday, an attempted attack unfolded in a town down the coast

If there’s one superhero character whose rise might be most tied to the events of World War II, it is Captain America, who emerged from the minds of legends Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and sprung forth from an iconic 1941 debut cover on which Cap smacks Hitler right in the kisser.

A customer dining at Washington’s Oceanaire restaurant noticed an unusual line at the bottom of his receipt: “Due to the rising costs of doing business in this location, including costs associated with higher minimum wage rates, a 3% surcharge has been added to your total bill.”